Collected Prose

— thrown out to sea in the hope that it will one day wash up to land, “perhaps on the shore of the heart.” “Poems,” he continued, “even in this sense are under way: they are heading toward something. Toward what? Toward some open place that can be inhabited, toward a thou which can be addressed, perhaps toward a reality which can be addressed.”
    The poem, then, is not a transcription of an already known world, but a process of discovery, and the act of writing for Celan is one that demands personal risks. Celan did not write solely in order to express himself, but to orient himself within his own life and take his stand in the world, and it is this feeling of necessity that communicates itself to a reader. These poems are more than literary artifacts. They are a means of staying alive.
    In a 1946 essay on Van Gogh, Meyer Schapiro refers to the notion of realism in a way that could also apply to Celan. “I do not mean realism in the repugnant, narrow sense that it has acquired today,” Professor Schapiro writes, “… but rather the sentiment that external reality is an object of strong desire or need, as a possession and potential means of fulfillment of the striving human being, and is therefore the necessary ground of art.” Then, quoting a phrase from one of Van Gogh’s letters — “I’m terrified of getting away from the possible …” — he observes: “Struggling against the perspective that diminishes an individual object before his eyes, he renders it larger than life. The loading of the pigment is in part a reflex of this attitude, a frantic effort to preserve in the image of things their tangible matter and to create something equally solid and concrete on the canvas.”
    Celan, whose life and attitude toward his art closely parallel Van Gogh’s, used language in a way that is not unlike the way Van Gogh used paints, and their work is surprisingly similar in spirit. * Neither Van Gogh’s stroke nor Celan’s syntax is strictly representational, for in the eyes of each the “objective” world is interlocked with his perception of it. There is no reality that can be posited without the simultaneous effort to penetrate it, and the work of art as an ongoing process bears witness to this desire. Just as Van Gogh’s painted objects acquire a concreteness “as real as reality,” Celan handles words as if they had the density of objects, and he endows them with a substantiality that enables them to become a part of the world, his world — and not simply its mirror.

    Celan’s poems resist straightforward exegesis. They are not linear progressions, moving from word to word, from point A to point B. Rather, they present themselves to a reader as intricate networks of semantic densities. Interlingual puns, oblique personal references, intentional misquotations, bizarre neologisms: these are the sinews that bind Celan’s poems together. It is not possible to keep up with him, to follow his drift at every step along the way. One is guided more by a sense of tone and intention than by textual scrutiny. Celan does not speak explicitly, but he never fails to make himself clear. There is nothing random in his work, no gratuitous elements to obscure the perception of the poem. One reads with one’s skin, as if by osmosis, unconsciously absorbing nuances, overtones, syntactical twists, which in themselves are as much the meaning of the poem as its analytic content. Celan’s method of composition is not unlike that of Joyce in Finnegans Wake . But if Joyce’s art was one of accumulation and expansion — a spiral whirling into infinity — Celan’s poetry is continually collapsing into itself, negating its very premises, again and again arriving at zero. We are in the world of the absurd, but we have been led there by a mind that refuses to acquiesce to it.
    Consider the following poem, “Largo,” one of Celan’s later poems — and a typical example of the difficulty a reader faces in tackling Celan. * In Michael Hamburger’s translation it reads:
You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one:

more-than-
death-
sized we lie
together, autumn
crocuses, the timeless, teems
under our breathing eyelids,
the pair of blackbirds hangs
beside us, under
our whitely drifting
companions up there, our

meta-
stases.

    The German text, however, reveals things that necessarily elude the grasp of translation:
Gleichsinnige du, heidegängerisch Nahe:
über-
sterbens-
gross liegen
wir beieinander, die